Polypharmacology (action of drugs against multiple targets) represents a tempting avenue for new drug development; unfortunately, methods capable of exploiting the known polypharmacology of drugs for target deconvolution are lacking. Gujral et al. present an ensemble approach using elastic net regularization combined with mRNA expression profiling and previously characterized data on a large set of kinase inhibitors to identify kinases that are important for epithelial and mesenchymal cell migration. By profiling a selected optimal set of 32 kinase inhibitors in a panel against six cell lines, they identified cell type-specific kinases that regulate cell migration, including the Mst and Taok family of MAPK kinases in mesenchymal cells.
